With the recent exodus of employees from Google to Twitter, is it simply Googlers leaving to the next best thing, or does Twitter have a larger plan in place?

This week, the ex–CEO of Feedburner and recent Google product manager, Dick Costolo, joined Twitter as its new COO. Costolo joins a barrage of Google employees who have left to join Twitter. Earlier this year Google lead designer, Douglas Bowmanleft to become the Creative Director at Twitter and was soon followed by Gmail engineer Dustin Diar.

With Twitter's latest Google employee acquisition of Dick Costolo, Twitter inherits someone who knows what Google is looking for when acquiring companies. Dick had led Feedburner through the acquisition by Google. Feedburner was known for their analytics and perhaps twitter is looking at adding analytics to their system as a way of generating revenue. Twitter has conquered one goal, getting massive traffic, but ways to earn a profit still eludes them. By developing analytic programs with Costolo's experience, perhaps Twitter can offer users a paid subscription to information and data that isn’t available by 3rd parties.

One possibility is that Twitter is just poaching all the good players they can with no intent on selling to Google or anyone else for that matter. Some industry experts say that it is too soon for Twitter to begin thinking of selling, but is it? In this business no one can predict when a company reaches their pinnacle. Look at MySpace as an example. Is it possible that another "Twitter–esque" company can come along in the near future and dethrone Twitter? Of course it is, remember what Yahoo did to AOL, Google to Yahoo, Facebook to MySpace; nothing is forever in this business and there are a lot of smart people working on the next best thing as I write this.

It isn't new for Google employees to leave to the new "shinny" company. Remember when articles were written about Googlers leaving to Facebook and Myspace? Even as of late, several Google employees have left to companies such as VMware. Also, other employees are cashing in their stocks now that they have matured and opting to start their own businesses or just retire early. So maybe all of this is just what happens in the tech industry every time there is a new company that comes along and appears to threaten the thrown of the top players.

Should Twitter sell to Google? This question will get a different answer depending on who you ask, what their interests are, and probably even the time of day that you ask it. The leaders at Twitter and Google are smart enough to see the power of the two entities being united, but that doesn’t mean it will ever happen. If it did happen, the partnership between Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo would soon be forgotten. As long as Twitter continues to grow, developing real time search, analytics, and finds a way to be profitable, the ball is in their court.